Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Water Garden 2013...and Ultrarunning

This year just wanted to show one of my 3 Water Lilies. This one is pink or a light red, and although it came from a big box store (Lowe's) it has consistently bloomed like a workhorse for the past 10 years or so.

[image credit Gary]

The Parrot Feather is peeking out at the upper left, another workhorse plant.

The two plants are quite analogous to Ultrarunning. See, most of the real work of Ultrarunning comes in training. The races are the glory events, which are only made possible by all the hard work in preparation. To stretch the point, in the water garden, all the day to day heavy lifting is done by the everyday plants, the ones we almost take for granted, like the Lilies and the Parrot Feather.

But then when you examine these journeyman plants you see a special beauty that comes from their ordinariness.